The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

CMDR Nef

CMDR Nef
Your guesstimate on the release of planetary landing?

As someone who's recently just started playing, and found out that, that one feature I thought would liven the game up a bit between space journeys, (getting out of your ship and stretching your legs) is not only coming, but on a grand scale, left me in much surprise. People who know this game well, know the developers well, and everything they've done, can you make an educated guess on when this supposed expansion will come? What I've found here on the forum is that they're tight lip'd on the subject, and keep repeating the same old, "it's coming" line. But are we talking next month coming? or late 2016 coming?
 

Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
Omnifarious Nef said:
As someone who's recently just started playing, and found out that, that one feature I thought would liven the game up a bit between space journeys, (getting out of your ship and stretching your legs) is not only coming, but on a grand scale, left me in much surprise. People who know this game well, know the developers well, and everything they've done, can you make an educated guess on when this supposed expansion will come? What I've found here on the forum is that they're tight lip'd on the subject, and keep repeating the same old, "it's coming" line. But are we talking next month coming? or late 2016 coming?
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To be honest I've heard rumours that it is the gamecon announcement and *may* be here in time to boost December and Christmas sales. However, I have no idea how well informed/misinformed these rumours are.
From the older Dev Diaries on youtube it sounds like flying and landing around planets can be easily done in game, the problem is putting interesting stuff in there instead of having different coloured skyboxes.

If I had to do it I'd be looking at a staggered release: Walking around your own ship -> Walking around stations -> Atmosphere flight -> Landing (docking style) on planets -> Fully functional planet landing.

That gives them time to troubleshoot the walking and stuff whilst being able to have another team creating cities, mountains, hurricanes and other content for when landing finally arrives. Not sure though, all speculation.
My personal guess is that we will see passenger missions and the Dolphin/Beluga introduced this year as well as other tweaks and the paid expansions will be introduced next year.

I can't see planet landings coming in this year, I mean imagine all the meshes and textures required to create a reasonably realistic city that the procedural generation system can deal with. If you need 50 buildings to make it feel unique and each building takes the team a day to complete that'd take the whole team 2 months to complete with a 5 day working week, then think about making it all work, bugshooting, getting it to generate in the right places at the right time clipping issues, lighting etc etc.
Would be great but to do it properly I'd say next year.
 
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Cadoc

Cadoc
That depends on what we mean by "planetary landings". Landing on planets that just works the same as existing stations but with different graphics? Maybe, possibly this year. Planetary landing that allows us to walk around on planet surfaces and explore unknown worlds? Maybe a couple of years from now.
 

Kramster

Kramster
GriM_AoD said:
Hopefully after we can explore ship and station interiors.
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I was thinking about this earlier, maybe they won't even try to do FPS style avatar movement at all or at least not yet.

Maybe Planetary landings will be vehicle based only so you fly or beam down then take command of a surface vehicle with a variety of roles available. These could include mining, exploration, resource gathering and trading between surface bases. It would probably be an easier thing to do given limited resources. So basically the same as we have now but on a planet and maybe only on planets that FD choose.

If this is the case then probably sooner than I would have originally expected and, in effect, more of the same with a prettier backdrop
 
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ZeeWolf

ZeeWolf
The last newsletter to mention it

The future of Elite Dangerous video released on launch

That is all we know for certain. All we have been officially told is that "most of the dev team" have been working on something "secret for PC & Mac" which will be announced at Gamescon in four weeks.

The rest is speculation. We just don't know. Some of us paid for an 'expansion pass' last year. Since part of the funding process going forward is based on those expansions being made its very likely that work is being done, but we won't know until next month how close we are.
 

Tarman

Tarman
Omnifarious Nef said:
I assume this is a much discussed anticipated topic?
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More like speculated into a pile of atomized horsemeat. :D It doesn't have its own multipart megathread but it's one of the most widely anticipated, yet feared-to-never-appear future features of the game. It's a beacon of hope for some, a waste of development time to others.
 

CMDR Nef

CMDR Nef
ZeeWolf said:
The last newsletter to mention it

The future of Elite Dangerous video released on launch

That is all we know for certain. All we have been officially told is that "most of the dev team" have been working on something "secret for PC & Mac" which will be announced at Gamescon in four weeks.

The rest is speculation. We just don't know. Some of us paid for an 'expansion pass' last year. Since part of the funding process going forward is based on those expansions being made its very likely that work is being done, but we won't know until next month how close we are.
Click to expand...
Hopefully it doesn't follow the suit of other console ports where it takes 6 months to a year to get ported! (Like Terraria and Minecraft updates, or Payday 2 updates. I mean, the last Minecraft update took like 8 months, and only added night time sensors and colored glass lmao.)
 
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